Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, published in March and edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, brings together Dworkin’s most impactful writings, including selections from Woman Hating (1974), Our Blood: Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976), Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), and Intercourse (1987), among other works and previously unpublished essays. “The purpose of theory is to clarify the world in which we live, how it works, why things happen as they do. In 2005, MacKinnon wrote that the radical feminist author “lived the stigma of being identified with women, especially sexually abused women,” “exposed the ugliest realities of women’s lives and said what they mean,” “saw through male power as a political system,” and “exposed the sexual core of male supremacy, the heart of the male darkness.” A courageous (and prolific) writer with a passion for justice, Dworkin rooted her feminism in the lives of the most downtrodden women.

MacKinnon, the prolific Dworkin’s writing did just that. You may not be able to grapple with the notion that sex is a continuum and that '''man' and 'woman' are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs'' but most of what she has to say is not nearly so preposterous.Maligned in life and in death as anti-man and anti-sex, Andrea Dworkin believed writing “could move the earth and raise the dead - at least, the living dead.” According to her friend Dr. If you examine the pages of Screw or Oz you'll find that these liberated counterculture rags are every bit as sexist as Playboy - the only real difference being ''the awful quality of the writing.'' And Dworkin has some very provocative things to say about how Christianity reinforced patriarchy by depicting women, starting with Eve, as naturally sinful instruments of Satan. But she is bright, entertaining and incisive when she is dissecting the roles available to men and women as articulated in fairy tales, Christian myths and contemporary pornography - they do indeed contain ''cultural truths.'' Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are desirable to the Prince because they are beautiful, passive and helpless. Her shrill, bludgeoning style will probably put you off and her conclusion - that we must all embrace ''androgynous myths'' to destroy the master/slave relationship - will only be accepted by the fringes of the Women's Movement. Dworkin covers a lot of ground - Cinderella and Snow White, the ancient Chinese custom of footbinding, medieval witchcraft and Screw magazine - in her efforts to document the victimization of Woman.

Woman hating by andrea dworkin